Tough Talking for Marines in Iraq

Noah Shachtman
06.07.03

Don't tell the members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force about information overload. They already know all about it.

During Gulf War II, members of the force often had to use a helmet headset, four radios and two laptops at once to communicate with their comrades and commanders -- all while crammed into light armored vehicles crawling across the Mesopotamian desert.

An analysis of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force's experience in central Iraq has yielded a number of important lessons about what gadgets worked and what high-tech equipment flopped in Gulf War II.

During the war, U.S. chieftains and military analysts talked with wide-eyed wonder about how quick and how perfectly seamless communications between U.S. troops had become. In a matter of minutes, they crowed, a tip about Saddam Hussein's location became an assault on a Baghdad restaurant.

Now, it seems, that flawless network is at least equal parts Rube Goldberg and Henry Ford.

"They had a communication system for every eventuality, and for every issue," said Patrick Garrett, an analyst with the defense think tank Globalsecurity.org. "But they really didn't integrate them all together."

Take, for instance, a Marine riding aboard a light armored vehicle. According to the field report, he'd use a headset to talk on the intercom to his buddies inside the vehicle. When his squad leader called, the Marine would have to remove his helmet and grab a hand-held radio to chat. To speak to a group of Marines nearby, he'd have to grab another radio. And to rap with the Navy SEALs, he'd need yet another radio. He would manage all this while keeping an eye on two different laptops showing the positions of friendly and hostile forces.

In "C3" (command, control, communications) vehicles, which relay orders and battlefield intelligence to grunts, the clutter was even worse.

"I personally saw that every 'shelf' was taken up by a radio and seat space and floor spaces were taken up with open computers," the report's anonymous author said.

"When I read this, I got déjà vu," said Jim Lewis, an analyst at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. "(The military) has been working since (1983's invasion of) Grenada on these issues. I thought they had made more progress."

The problem may be more about logistics than technology, however. Any single system to talk or share information would have worked fine. But "units never seemed to receive enough of one communications asset, forcing them to rely on a 'hodgepodge' of assets," according to the report.

Marine Corps Systems Command did not respond to repeated calls to comment on the report, found by Wired News on Col. David Hackworth's website, Soldiers for the Truth.

To share text messages and digital files, one unit of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force would have the Blue Force Tracker communications system. Another would have the MDACT (Mobile Data Automated Communications Terminal) program. The two have the same functions, essentially. But they can't talk to each other. So when the Marines sent reconnaissance photos to their commanders, they often would use a courier with a Memorex hard drive to carry the pictures by hand to headquarters.

MDACT has other problems as well. Like many of the Marines' communications systems, it relies on UHF and VHF radio frequencies. But these are "line-of-sight" bands. So if a hill or the curve of the horizon keeps two people from seeing each other, they can't talk. And in the quicksilver push to Baghdad, units often lost sight of one another.

Satellite-based systems, on the other hand, don't have such limitations. Rather than send their signals directly, these systems bounce them off of "birds" in space. As the war progressed, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force increasingly turned to Iridium satellite phones to talk. They also used Blue Force Tracker for text messaging and positioning information. They were the "only consistently reliable means of communication," according to the report.

"Satellite phones proved to be the big winner," Garrett said. "If I had money, I'd drop some of it into Iridium."

However, Iridium and all of the other military communications systems eventually are supposed to be replaced. The Joint Tactical Radio System (called JTRS or "Jitters" in military circles) is a software-based package for voice, data and images. It's supposed to work across every slice of the spectrum used by the armed forces and talk to every sort of old-school military radio now in use.

The idea, Lewis said, is that the Jitters operator "won't have to switch (frequencies). The system will do that for him."

A team of defense contractors, led by Boeing, is developing Jitters. It's supposed to be ready by 2005.

"It's in the works, but it's been in the works for years," Lewis noted.

Until then, Marines will have to rely on a patchy, cumbersome, jury-rigged system to keep in touch.